


you were with me every waking hour

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: due South
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 22:05:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU from "Victoria's Secret".</p>
            </blockquote>





	you were with me every waking hour

A shot rings out.

"Ben?" Victoria whispers into the aching night. "Are you..."

And Fraser thinks: _I don't know._

A bullet is a tiny centre of gravity, a pulling focus for the dimensions of the world, cutting through the air and silence, through skin and flesh and bone. He understands that. In the vastness, the snow and the sky and the endless frosted land, the huge space where they have always walked, himself and his people, they understand the sanctity of small things. You can only own yourself, he thinks, dizzily, feverishly, yourself and your few small things, your handprints and tiny bullets, your tiny scratches on the enormity of everything that there is.

You own yourself, he thinks, over and over, you own what you make of yourself, and he slumps against the side, falls, and she catches him, holds him against her and breathes in, out, in, out, with the rhythm of the train. The sky swoops past in a firework display of city lights and a plane passes overhead. The flashes are silent, tail-lights winking into dimness. "There'll be an APB," Victoria whispers into his ear. "They're going to come after us, Ben."

In her arms, he becomes Ben. "Shit," she says, and she means it like poetry. Like poetry, it's a word as shorthand, a way of shouting _I love you_ and _this is your blood_ into the roar of the rushing dark. "Ben, you... _shit_."

She holds him and he can't let go, and this here is what he doesn't understand: the stillness that breaks the rhythm of the world that he knows. He understands running, rhythm of body and blood, and the movement of the train, the sweep of the cool air against his face, and he understands how a heartbeat works: how it pumps blood into lungs and around a body and reminds you, when the silence is as vast as the horizon and the air is clear in a sight-line straight through the troposphere, that _you're alive_, _you're alive_.

But the moment, where the bullet lodges itself and pain becomes a rich raw reality against the cold-air background of the world, and it is all still – though the world spins on through and around it – is what he doesn't, can't understand.

"Ben," she says, quickly, urgently, "we have to wait to get off this train, you understand? You have to..." – and she doesn't say _hold on_, because his knuckles are white with it already – "because they know, they can trace us here... your blood..."

Somebody has that. If not the precinct, then the RCMP, someone somewhere has a database and a few mouldering cells beneath a plastic slide, an identity in shorthand, Fraser, Ben – and he's slipping in it, his own life beneath his boots. Victoria holds him up, shifts back and forth, and it feels like she's crying, but he can't be sure. This is the first time they'll fly through the night, but it won't be the last, and his thoughts are clearing, as though the smog of the city is dissipating into translucency. He can hold them all safely in his mind, sharp details reflected back from a life as yet unlived: the winding routes that turn back upon themselves, cities seen only through glass and twilight, the crunch of snow under running feet.

It's cold. He breathes in, sits back against the edge of the arch and keeps his balance. Everything is darkly sticky, and they are held together by the mess, fabric pulling slowly away from skin, and she hisses with the movement. Most people, he thinks, have never seen arterial blood. It's a very bright red colour.

"Ben," she says again, and her voice is holding him here. "Ben, you will be all right."

He will, he thinks. With each mile, the air sweetens, snow shaken through it like powdered sugar. And then the momentum picks up again, a crescendo coming back up into his mouth, and then the headlong rush of it all – the running, the rails, the rhythm of his heartbeat echoing in his ears and out into the great wide world, and it sings, refrain and chorus, north, north, north.

It will be all right, he thinks. They will run out of land and places to run, and permafrost. They will run headlong into the northern lights, the false dawns, two weeks of twilight and six months of night. They will come at last to the lean-to in the snow, the place where the world is enormous and contingent, and humanity speaks poetry into rising smoke, fades away. And the snow will take them back, their crimes, the love and death and betrayal they have made their own, and return them safely to the heart of the earth.

"I love you," she whispers, and the world turns beneath them towards mourning.


End file.
